Announcing a New York Times iOS Feature that Helps Readers Find Stories Relevant to Them
The New York Times publishes around 160 articles per day, with only a fraction of those articles making it to the digital home page. We wanted to find a way for our loyal readers to easily keep up with the stories that are most relevant to them. We’ve created a new space within our iOS app called Your Feed where readers can choose from 24 channels to follow, giving them more control over their experience with The Times. Some channels pull stories from existing New York Times sections and columns, such as Modern Love, while other channels, such as Gender & Society, pull content from a variety of sections. These curated channels highlight the breadth of journalism we publish and surface relevant content readers may have missed.
Some channels include commentary from our reporters and editors, and feature worthwhile reads from outside of The Times. This added context is only available on Your Feed, and we’re experimenting with this extra layer to bring deeper insights and context to stories.
Reading a printed paper is a customizable experience. When you hand someone a paper, they have access to all the stories; they pick out the sections they want and read stories of interest. Maybe while they’re thumbing through, they find a story or section that they didn’t realize they wanted to read! Chances are, different readers will select different sections and stories.
It’s been my job as a product designer at The New York Times to take this idea and translate it to your phone.
How We Designed Your Feed
1. Readers told us follow is the thing to do
Following is not a new concept. It’s a common feature in apps and on websites: we follow on Twitter, Instagram and on other platforms to get the content we want to see. The New York Times is not new to the following space, either; we’ve experimented with different ways of surfacing customized content over the years. While some of our experiments have been more successful than others, they all have informed the latest iteration of Your Feed.
The biggest ‘ah-ha!’ moment came from in-person research we did to explore what a customized space within our digital experience could look like. Our initial hypothesis was that readers wanted a better way to save content, but in the end, we discovered that the ability to follow different types of content was the greater user need.
In the research we conducted, we presented research participants with four hypothetical customized features: “Archive,” “Follow,” “News you can use” and a “Queue.”
Along with each of the four hypothetical features, we also showed participants a deck of cards, with each card representing a piece of New York Times content, and asked them to select all of the cards they were interested in for that hypothetical content space.
We then asked participants to take the physical cards they had in hand and group them on on a blank canvas, or “screen,” based on how they would find the different content types the most useful. We then discussed the reasoning behind how participants organized their cards, and their expectations around different messaging channels, such as notifications, and the relationship to both the idea of a new space and the home page.
After talking with participants about their decisions over several rounds, and thinking about the different use cases that arose, it became clear that the ability to follow New York Times content was a promising opportunity to serve unmet user needs. Of all the hypothetical features we tested, Follow proved to have the fewest number of workarounds, while also solving for several different user needs at once. It was the biggest hole our team could fill in our product.
Through our research, we also learned that users were interested in having a space separate from the home page that delivered a customized feed of content.
To validate our research, we created a very hacky prototype of Follow for desktop web. This prototype featured a matrix of channels based on page views and engagement, and it allowed readers to follow channels from article pages. Although the test was held together with Scotch tape, readers were following channels and coming back more often to see what was published. It quickly proved the research right: our readers wanted a way to follow our journalism and have a customizable space.
2. Showcasing a writer’s voice and tone is really important
When I first started at The Times, I joined a team that was working on a mobile prototype that delivered stories and photos in a more conversational way. Through that prototype, we learned that readers were interested in interacting with our content in a more casual way.
With this in mind, we simultaneously did a text message experiment throughout the summer 2016 Rio Olympics. Readers could sign up to get text messages from our Deputy Sports Editor, Sam Manchester, as he covered the Games. The texts were funny and offered behind-the-scenes insights that readers couldn’t get anywhere else. People really engaged in this two-way communication; They texted Sam back and asked specific questions at a volume and rate that was, frankly, difficult for one person to keep up with. We’ve since improved.
Both of these projects highlighted how our design-led team needed a more streamlined workflow with the newsroom. Part of the challenge was figuring out how two departments with different disciplines — Product & Design and the newsroom — could create a workflow that served each other’s needs. This didn’t happen with our previous projects and we planned accordingly for Your Feed. We learned that we needed to create a new workflow for editors and reporters that fit seamlessly with their already hectic days.
To achieve this, we leveraged The Times’s wide use of Slack to act as the CMS for Your Feed, to prototype quickly. Our back-end engineer, Brandon Hopkins, built a bot that interacts with editors, producers and reporters to guide them through the process of sharing links and publishing commentary.
3. We need to help our readers, not overwhelm them
With previous messaging experiments, we learned to limit the number of stories we delivered to readers. Too many new stories resulted in users ignoring the feature. Readers said it was too close to their real email inboxes and it made them feel like they were working through a to-do list, instead of catching up on their interests in an enjoyable way.
This sentiment came up during our in-person research as well. Interview after interview, users discussed how they feel overwhelmed and want solutions for navigating a nonstop news cycle.
When we were determining what channels would be offered in Your Feed, we knew we had to strike the right balance with channel topics. There had to be enough channels to satisfy a range of interests, but not so many options that we would overwhelm our users.
We took the same considerations for the publication cadence within channels. We couldn’t make topic-based channels draw content algorithmically because it could inundate users’ feeds — we may publish dozens of stories on a particular topic in a given week, for example. So our topic-based channels (Climate Change, Health & Fitness, Space) are curated by New York Times editors who ensure we deliver a diverse selection of stories.
What’s Next
Over the next several months we will be adjusting the channels we offer, expanding how readers can follow channels and adding new features to Your Feed. We’ll be watching and listening closely to how readers are engaging with the channels.
We’ll also continue to explore what a customized space within The New York Times means by testing new features that will help us determine the future of Your Feed. We’re excited to iterate on different versions of incorporating save, notifications and managing your interests.
Take a look and let us know what you think.
Shannon Smith contributed writing.
